The Rum Historian title
HISTORY OF CUBAN RUM
6. SUGAR, RACE AND GROWTH
In this article I am not going to speak about rum … well, almost. Indeed, the time has come to dedicate some time to the general history of Cuba, because without knowing, albeit in broad outline, the historical context it is not possible to understand how Cuban rum was born and developed throughout the 1800s.
The history of Cuba in the first half of the 1800s is one of spectacular growth, both economic and demographic. The main engine of this growth was sugar, of which Cuba became the greatest producer in the world: around the 1850s, Cuba produced 31% of the world’s sugar, despite the growth of beet sugar! There wasn’t only sugar though, even the exports of coffee, tobacco and many more commodities grew greatly. This growth was fueled and made possible by a high rate of labor immigration – both the forced immigration of enslaved African blacks and the voluntary one of free, European, white immigrants – and by the adoption of cutting edge technologies; all of it led and promoted from inside the island, both by the Sugar Barons and the Spanish local authorities, and not by Spain itself, which maintained political dominance, but saw its economic clout diminish.
Some 30,000 French exiles from St. Domingue settled in Cuba and had a major role in the development of commercial agriculture, while the island was moving to fill the vacuum in sugar and coffee production caused by the victory of the black revolution.
Cuban plantations needed slaves, a lot of slaves, and the Cuban Sugar Barons used all the means at their disposal to be able to buy as many as possible. With Francisco de Arengo y Parreño as their intellectual leader, they demanded and got facilitations and tax exemptions for the ships of every country carrying them to Cuba. The clear-sightedness of this ruling class, their full awareness of their needs and perspectives is absolutely striking. But what is striking is also the fact that, at the turn of the 1800s, by which time the abolitionist movements were already strong, that class had no moral scruples whatsoever towards the shameful slave trade.
In 1807, thanks to the long fight of the abolitionist movements, Great Britain forbade the slave trade from January 1st, 1808, and in the following years other countries followed its example. In 1820 Spain too abolished the slave trade. In 1838, slavery at last ended in the British West Indies and in 1848 also in the French colonies. (I would like to point out that to the imperishable glory of the French Revolution, already in 1794 the National Convention had abolished the slavery; but in 1802 Napoleon – his imperishable infamy – had reintroduced it).
So, for decades the slave trade had been prohibited, but in many countries, like Cuba, Brazil and the US, slavery itself had not. Therefore, slave smuggling became a thriving business, in which North American slavers and shipbuilders had an important role and also Spanish slavers, newcomers to the business, distinguished themselves. One of the consequences of the massive purchase of slaves is that, throughout the first half of the 1800s, Cuba always had a black and mulatto majority. At the beginning of that period, Cuban slavery had some unique characteristics. Here is the testimony of Baron Alexander Von Humboldt, who visited Cuba twice at the beginning of the century and published his renowned “The Island of Cuba: a Political Essay” in 1826 “In no part of the world, where slavery exists, is manumission so frequent as in the island of Cuba; for Spanish legislation, directly the reverse of French and English, favors in an extraordinary degree the attainment of freedom, placing no obstacle in its way, nor making it in any manner onerous. The right which every slave has of seeking a new master, or purchasing his liberty, if he can pay the amount of his cost; the religious sentiment that induces many persons in good circumstances to concede by will freedom to a certain number of negroes; the custom of retaining a number of both sexes for domestic service, and the afflictions that necessarily arise from this familiar intercourse with the whites; and the facilities allowed to slave-workmen to labor for their own account, by paying a certain stipulated sum to their masters, are the principal causes why so many blacks acquire their freedom in the towns.”
By the way, in Humboldt’s treatise there is a single reference to rum, which anyway confirms the importance of the product: “It is generally said that seventy-five pounds of purged sugar yields one keg (seven gallons) of molasses; and that this, with the refuse sugar, covers the expenses of the plantation: but this can be true only where large quantities of rum are made. Two thousand boxes of sugar give 15,000 kegs of molasses, which will make 500 pipes of rum, worth $25 each.”
In the following years, the slaves’ condition worsened rapidly and manumission became increasingly rarer, even though all foreign visitors were amazed by the number of free blacks and mulattos. “
There can too be no doubt that slaves on efficient modern plantations with steam-driven mills were treated more inhumanely than those on the old oxen-driven mills; they were confined to menial and manual labour; and they were regarded and treated as economic rather than human units; hence the greater number of slave revolts on large and rich mills.” (H. Thomas “Cuba. A History”)
Here is an extract from a classic of 19th century Cuban literature, “Cecilia Valdés” by Cirilo Villaverde “It is, however, a strange coincidence that for some time now so many blacks have revolted precisely on those farms that had recently changed their system to mill sugar cane. ¿Will it be because these stupid creatures thought that their workload was going to increase because, instead of using oxen-driven or mule–driven mills we now use steam-driven mills?”
The existence of a majority of blacks and mulattos, both slaves and free, haunted the Cuban white élites. They were terrified that what had happened in nearby Haiti could happen again in Cuba: a victorious rebellion of the blacks and consequent “Africanization” of the Island. Even a now old Francisco de Arango y Parreño, who had been a great promoter of the slave trade, wrote a tract against the trade and encouraged his countrymen to procreate mulattos in order to ‘whiten’ (blanquear) the island.
The authorities reacted by encouraging immigration from Europe and granting prizes, incentives and various kinds of concessions to white immigrants. Their strategy was successful. Waves of white immigrants voluntarily arrived in Cuba and in 1859 the majority of the population was white again. Here is some data from the censuses of that period:
- 1827 population 704,400: whites 311,051; slaves 286,900; free coloured 106,400
- 1841 population 1,007,000: whites 418,000; slaves 436,000; free coloured 153,000
- 1859 population 1,180,000: whites 622,700; slaves 367,300; free coloured 189,800
“Immigration has been the single most important element in the historical formation of Cuba, and the island represents one of the most extreme examples of a global population crossroad in the history of human mobility. …The sugar boom was accompanied by a transatlantic wave that brought some 780,000 African slaves between 1790 and the mid1860s with drastic and wide ranging impacts. It increased and Africanized the population. It transformed an economy based on peasant production, service, and trade into one that was mixed but driven by a monocultural plantation complex. It changed a system of social relations based on free labor with some slaves into one where slavery became omnipresent.” (J. C. Moya “Cuba: Immigration and Emigration”).
In the middle of this growth, Cuba maintained and developed its own characteristics and did not become another Sugar Island. “Over the entire 19th century, however, another Cuban peculiarity is that plantation slavery represents more an addition than a transformation. Other islands in the Caribbean began as settler colonies and became slave societies. The population of Barbados, for example, was 86% white in the 1640’s and 95% black and slave 40 years later. … Unlike British and French Caribbean colonies, slaves never represented a majority … The white and free colored peasantry not only survived the sharp advent of slavery but increased their ranks both in absolute and relative numbers after the mid-19th century. And so did the white urban working class. The explanation of this is that the sugar boom did not simply turn Cuba into a plantation society, as is often assumed. It also turned it into one of the most dynamic and modern regions in the world, a place that offered some opportunities to free immigrants and that would become even more attractive after the slave traffic ended. During the first half of the 19th century GDP per capita was higher than in the US: Cuba was then more urban than England and the Netherlands, presumably the most urban country in the world. It had, during the 19th century, more physicians per capita than Great Britain and France; the seventh railroad in the world; and higher wage, schooling, and literacy rates than in more than a dozen European countries.” (Moya)
In the meantime, the political situation in the island changed profoundly and became more tense and violent. The victory of the independence revolutions in South America reduced the Spanish Empire to Cuba e Puerto Rico (and Philippinas) and unleashed into Cuba a host of displaced bureaucrats, soldiers, and clerics, along with a multitude of Peninsular merchants. Spain, regardless of the changing political color of its governments, did not want to lose Cuba: “
The captain-general was in May 1825 given ‘facultades omnímodas’ – an authority to do much as he liked; residents of Cuba lost the protection of what law there was. … Forty thousand Spanish troops thronged Cuba and the country swarmed with government spies and informers. The laws preventing Cuban-born persons from serving in the army or the civil service were rigidly maintained. Cuba was an armed camp. Martial law lasted in effect fifty years.” (Thomas)
Also as a reaction to this oppression, in those years a new Cuban identity was forged and small, clandestine independent groups were born, which were joined in by some of the most prominent intellectuals of the country. Some independence conspiracies were easily discovered by the authorities, and some rebellions of slaves and free blacks were brutally crushed. What is most striking is that under martial law, with widespread corruption and in the midst of revolts and bloody repressions, Cuban economy continued to grow and generate wealth not only for the elites, but also for a large part of the population. Meanwhile, after decades of growth, in the mid-nineteenth century, the United States became Cuba’s main commercial partner, relegating Spain to an economic and commercial role of secondary importance. The profound economic and social changes in the two countries gave rise to two parallel but distinct political movements, today almost forgotten: Cuban annexationism and American expansionism.
We must understand that the territorial, economic and demographic expansion of the US was under everyone’s eyes and that many new States had joined the Union. Part of the Cuban élite saw in the annexation to the US, that is, in becoming another State of the Union, the certainty of close trade relations with the most dynamic economy of the time and a safeguard against always possible revolts of the black majority. On the other side, there was a strong expansionist movement in the US, suffice it to remember the war of 1848 which cost Mexico huge territories, and the slave States of the South saw with favor the entry of another slave state into the Union. The US Government even offered Spain more than once to buy Cuba, as it had bought Louisiana and Florida, but Spain refused. There were also armed landings of independentists, more or less supported by the annexationist élite and the expansionist movements of the US, but they were easily defeated.
Only in 1865, after the defeat of the South in the American Civil War, did Cuban annexationism disappear, while American expansionism took new forms. In those same years, following the abolition of slavery across the US, the slave trade finally declined and de facto ended around 1870. Slavery in Cuba was abolished at last in 1886, and in Brazil in 1888.
In Cuba, as had happened decades before all over the Caribbean, the first consequence of the emancipation of the slaves was a massive exodus of them from the plantations. The planters reacted by importing massive quantities of Indentured Workers from Europe, Africa and Asia, mainly from Portugal, Sierra Leone and India. In Cuba there was a huge influx especially of Chinese, to the extent that an area of La Habana became known as Barrio Chino.
Post Scriptum
The literature on slavery is immense and its horrors have been rightly exposed and documented. Yet, every now and then, some testimony strikes me particularly. Here, taken from Thomas’s book, is an ad that appeared in Cuba in the 1830s, an ordinary advertisement, regarding the ordinary sale of an ordinary commodity: [for sale] “una nodriza de dos meses de parida, con su cría o sin ella’” that is, a nursing mother two months from the child’s birth, with or without her child.
Marco Pierini
